Driving to brink of madness

THE surest way to attract a blitz of hate mail is to write critically about the Queen Mum, the Salvation Army, nurses or anyone permanently confined to a wheelchair.

This immediately brings me to Frank Williams, maker of champions and boss of the most consistently brilliant team in all British sport.

On alternate Sundays, television invariably brings us glimpses of Frank at his workplace. Equally invariably, they show a skull-like head leaning forward from his mobile chair to peer intently at the telemetry tracking his cars' progress round yet another tortuous grand prix circuit.

Usually one or the other is leading. Often it's a Williams one-two but you'd never know it from Frank's expressionless face. The only emotion he ever shows is a baleful glare when he catches a TV cameraman intruding on his privacy.

He never seems to give trackside interviews to the BBC though, astonishingly, this cold-fish image was utterly shattered last month at the Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest. Watching on Italian TV, I witnessed a smiling, beaming, charming Frank Williams speak at length in fluent Italian.

It may have been that his Italian interviewer was a stunning Gina Lollobrigida lookalike whose shorts seemed to start at her navel.

So is Frank Williams human after all?

On two counts - his services to British sport and his inspirational conquering of a physical infirmity inflicted by an horrendous motor accident - you would have conjectured that he would have been wheeled into Buckingham Palace long ago to collect his knighthood. Many have made it for far less.

Instead he is reviled by millions. How dare he sack Damon Hill when he's on the very brink of bringing the World Championship back to Britain and hire a German to team up with a Canadian to drive his cars in 1997?

I am only posing the question. I have no idea of the answer and nor do the trackside lobbyists who speculate (a) that Williams reckons Germany's Heinz-Harald Frentzen is a better driver anyway, (b) that Hill's demand for a pay rise from Pounds 4million this season to Pounds 8m next was golden goose suicide and (c) that Frank Williams is affronted by drivers who make their names in his cars and then start acting like prima donnas.

What we do know is that Michael Schumacher is earning Pounds 20m this year for piloting a car that mostly can't keep up and, by that yardstick, the other drivers tend to evaluate their worth.

Well, are they worth these astronomical sums? You may find this contradictory in a column which has frequently railed against the ridiculous purses shelled out to tennis players, golfers and footballers, but my answer is yes.

Thanks to advanced technology, better marshalling and the bloody-mindedness of drivers like Jackie Stewart, motor racing is far safer now than it was 25 years ago. But the message Ayrton Senna, the greatest driver of our age and arguably ever, failed to impart was the appalling danger that lies at every corner. He never did because he instantly died at one of them.

The glorious James Hunt called it blood money. He earned a comparatively modest Pounds 1m when he won the world title for Britain in 1976 but that was big money then. `It was a pretty reasonable arrangement,' he said in that laconic way of his. `Don't for a moment believe people pay money to see me drive,' he said. `They pay it to see me killed.'

What distinguishes grand prix motor racing from other sports is that only a miniscule fraction of the population has either the talent or the resources to get involved. There are maybe 400 drivers in the entire world with a chance, perhaps 40 capable of making it to a grand prix starting grid and only 10 who can possibly win.

Unfortunately they don't construct two-seater Formula One cars so the average reporter can never learn how it feels to pull 4.5G - four-and-a-half times your own body weight - when the driver flicks down five gears, braking hard and late down from 190mph to negotiate a hairpin bend.

Happily, down the years, I have had the chance to whizz around a few tracks in saloon cars with good drivers, the most recent at Silverstone last week with Martin Brundle, top driver of the Benson and Hedges-Jordan-Peugeot team. The top speed was never more than 120mph but the buffeting on the kerbs convinced you that any moment now you'd finish upside down in the hay.

`What G were we pulling there?' I asked Martin. `Oh, about 1.5,' he said, interrupting his esoteric interrogation about whether I placed any credence in the theory of biorhythms. Nigel Mansell, blasting round Brands Hatch one-handed, insisted on talking golf.

Best of all was the venerable Stirling Moss when we hit the icy peaks of the Appenines in Italy during a re-run of the 1000-mile Mille Miglia.

Stirling, cruising at a modest 90mph on a treacherous surface, caught my apprehensive glance as I stared down at the 3,000ft sheer drop on my side of roofless Mercedes. `Remember one thing, old boy,' he yelled. `If you go over, I go over with you.'

These men, even the sanest-looking among them, are utterly mad.

Damon Hill looks that way before a grand prix and so, throughout its duration, does his present employer, Frank Williams.

The fact is, of course, that down our history, be it on the battlefield or in the strategic bunker, these are the one-offs who've always won our wars.

Sunday's Monza Grand Prix should not be missed.

And to wrap things up for today . . .

FROM the burning plains of India, where the phones don't work and the planes don't fly and there are 17 children occupying your Press box seat, you manage, eventually, to file your story to the Daily Mail from this year's Cricket World Cup.

Where do these dispatches end up? I am most grateful to a kindly reader who points out that they definitely have utility value. In this case wrapping gutted blacks, whatever they are, on their passage from sea to fridge. My thanks also to a publication called Improve Your Sea Angling for such prominent publicity.

I am frequently informed, especially from readers in Liverpool, for some reason, that my views are fit only for wrapping fish and chips and this heartens me greatly. It proves, at least, that they buy the Daily Mail.

Very few journalists, including sportswriters, have the impertinence to assume their job is beyond getting there, informing the reader and, hopefully, entertaining him for 24 hours.

Happily, newspapers are a democratic business. Anyone convinced he can do it better is invited to walk in off the street and prove it. It won't change the fact that today's bon mot will end up wrapping tomorrow's fried cod.